Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

A modern and productive development environment should include both binary repositories and build caches.

So, you have heard a lot of great things about Develocity and you are thinking about doing a trial. Now what?

In our recent webcast, a former SoundCloud developer productivity engineer who has been through the trial experience answered your key questions about Develocity trials.

Minimizing software build and test feedback cycles has several obvious positive effect on engineering behaviors. This article untangles the cause and effect relationship with other indirect benefits you may have not considered.

Dependency issues are frustrating. The rules are complex and without the right data, determining exactly what caused the issue can take time and energy. The new dependency visualization feature in build scans can help.

The Most Important Development in Software Engineering Since the Introduction Agile, Lean Software Development, and DevOps methodologies and Tools.

Do you hate flaky tests? If your application interacts with browsers, external services, or has asynchronous behavior, it’s likely your team has suffered from flaky tests.

Non-deterministic tests are a ruinous infection that wastes developer time and reduces confidence in your test suite.

A fast and efficient CI pipeline can make or break your team’s developer experience and productivity. But what are the biggest determinants of CI pipeline performance? How do CI platform infrastructure and build/test performance impact each other and where should you focus your efforts?

Flaky, or non-deterministic, tests are a serious and prevalent problem in modern software development. If your application interacts with browsers, external devices or services, or has asynchronous behavior, it’s likely you have suffered from flaky tests. Martin Fowler has this to say about flaky tests:

Non-deterministic tests have two problems, firstly they are useless, secondly they are a virulent infection that can completely ruin your entire test suite. As a result they need to be dealt with as soon as you can, before your entire deployment pipeline is compromised. — Martin Fowler on Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests

Flaky tests compromise deployment pipelines by slowing them down and decreasing confidence in the correctness of changes. When changes regularly fail due to unrelated flaky tests, time is wasted, features are delayed, and developers are demotivated to make changes.

Testing takes the overwhelming majority of time during software builds. A single test can waste countless hours of building time — a single failure may cause an entire CI pipeline to have to be re-run. Ugh.

In this post, I will show you how to identify slow and unstable tests using the new Tests Dashboard in Develocity 2019.4 for Gradle and Maven builds. The dashboard visualizes test results across many builds for tests executed by Gradle’s built-in Test task and Maven’s SureFire plugin.

Whether producing private or public components, most projects are built with multiple software libraries interacting together. Aside from knowing what to publish and how to do so, this webcast covers strategies for streamlining the publication and integration processes.